Sunday — 11.08.20 — Twenty Eighth Assembling
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CONTENTS:
0. An Invitation
1. A Useful Reading
2. Preamble to a Meeting
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0. An Invitation
Dear Friends,
We would like to invite you to our twenty eighth test at assembling.
For those interested in joining us virtually, please write to mai [AT] 16beavergroup.org and we will send details.
We will meet on Sunday Nov. 8 2020 at 11AM (New York Time)
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1. A Useful Reading
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/33095/Speaking-of-Palestine-Solidarity-and-Its-Censors
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2. Preamble to a Meeting
a. We write this in a strange conjuncture, the earth still gripped by a virus which no one wants to claim as an outcome of an prolonged war against earth, a seemingly unstoppable drive to extract every element of value out of life, an earth whose multiple communities drift between the realization that whatever they have known and try to hold onto is deteriorating from under their feet (or paws or wings or fins or roots or spikes) and yet the wish to return to a place, a day, a moment when things were normal, before the figurative hell began.
b. But for the colonized, the formerly? post-colonized, for those seeking autonomy, self-determination, for the unrecognized, the unreckoned, the earth as we have known it has already disappeared, taken away from us, our worlds already disappeared, our histories erased, invisibilized and whatever has held them together has been despite and often against the normal and normalizations of that/those experiences which relegated ours’ others’ into the limbo of unacknowledged uncomfortable undecidable truths of orders outcomes in great part buttressed by lies and debts which can never be paid back or repaired.
c. Parables? tales? fictions? poems? art? far from the reality of the grind that pushes our chins to the asphalt or cement, which covers over more and more earth, masking more than our faces, and our hands readied to celebrate how the promise of that normality readies itself as remedy (certainly in its immediacy of averting more explicit forms of fascism and white supremacy yes) but is it enough to give our selves, once we have produced them well enough, to any authority willing to take us, believe us, pay us, feed us, house us, document us, until we can be strong enough to defend its ways and means which relegated the rest of us expendable?
d. Here we are thinking of the children of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh who have lived in relative peace, even if never safe, a suspended peace won through armed resistance of their elders after Soviet-Azeri in the 80’s and later the nascent Azerbaijani state in the early 90’s refused to recognize the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of those territories to determine their own political fate. Instead responding with violence, orchestrated pogroms and operations to empty villages, instigating a wider field of ethnic conflicts, displacements, a bloody war which could find and continues to find no end other than in the recognition of the Artsakh people’s desire for self-determination and decolonization.
e. And now today, in the real ‘dark ages’ of an ‘international community’ which privileges the interests of empires, territorial integrities as long as they fulfill the agendas of corporate interests, financial, gas and oil and mining companies, extractivist operations of every sort, cleptocrats, capitalist realists, oligarchs, wealth managers, investors, well-meaning bureaucrats, philanthropists, pundits, experts, remediators, crisis-managers of lip-synching, good objective journalists for hire to tell the story desired – to watch these same children of Artsakh defend themselves and their parents from Turkish and Israeli drones, high precision weaponry assembled through parts produced in all the ‘advanced’ nations, F-16’s, Turkish military planners, operators, young Azeris nourished on stories of lost territories and villainous Armenians which have no real tie to the lands which they have inhabited for thousands of years, battalions of imported mercenaries, ‘jihadists’ sent on a holy war with wages which will never cover the price they risk to pay with their life, some of them former ISIS recruits, others displaced by 10 years of war themselves, now turned into infantry guest-workers of a new age of savagery of the enlightened, of state-corporate-colonial-imperial formations of war industries, old empires or new ones searching to secure their futures in the futureless earth they continue to fabricate, or should we say destroy.
f. Here we are asking what sense the armaments and capabilities of these youth of Syria, who have only grown up in war, and now trained to terrorize their own neighbors, to become servants of new masters, to fight against the Kurdish resistance, their neighbors in Rojava, to do the bidding of their Turkish and prior to that when they were still called rebels, their Western backers, funders, or further afield taken to Libya and now today in Artsakh, as expendable lives, purchased and calculated (as a necessary expense, a layer of insulation, a vicariot who dies in the place of one’s subjects) on decades of profits from an international consortium of oil and gas interests (UK, US, Norway, Japan, France, India, Italy, Turkey) which could not but know that a good portion of the profits for the Azeri state, beside enriching its ruling family, would be used to purchase these very arms, these very mercenaries, these very lobby firms, think tanks who will continue to gas-light toward destruction until nothing but lies remain from one of the most overt campaigns of ethnic cleansing and resuming the ‘work to be done’ of their genocidal ancestors.
g. Here we are thinking of a Palestinian peasant in the Occupied Territories, who prepares for the coming harvest of the olives only to discover that all of his trees, his entire work of care for decades has been destroyed by Israeli settlers overnight, cutting each of the trees from their trunks. Or Palestinians, this time as citizens of Israel, who are prohibited by law and surveilled by drones to be prevented from foraging and harvesting multiple varieties of spontaneous herbs (under the pretext of nature conservancy) which are not only centerpieces to the life and culinary traditions of the community, but also a form of livelihood, a yearly rhythm, a rite of passage, a reclaiming and relation, a constant contact, friendship, interdependency with the earth.
h. We are also thinking here of Gaza, a place which is neither a country nor a camp, a prison, a place of experimentation with new forms of occupation, oppression, outsourced or externalized to the point of disoccupation, autonomy of the perpetually oppressed, a state of permanent siege, a live field of weapons experimentation, whether cluster, white phosphorous, or precision long range bombs, missiles, weaponry engineered to kill the capacity to live on and defend a way of life, a land, drones of terror, battle tested, now exported, extorted, big purchase, side payments, quid pro quos, outsourced to further fields of war, to Artsakh, to whomever willing to buy at the right price and seeking to enlarge their arsenals of death, which they call their means of liberation.
i. To those who buy, even peace is costed out, in a spreadsheet of misinformation and the suppression of thought, of speech, of histories, of lies and wars of oblivion which serve to falsify what lies beneath and between us. Someone thinking through the legacies of the Holocaust and Nazism, the continued destructive forces of Capitalism once wrote … “the only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique.”
j. If we could follow such a thought, let us propose that the thought we have aspire to has affinity with this thinking of, as a thinking of redemption. In this way, let’s meet under the aegis neither of hoped for call to a abstract ‘international community’, nor for such a community which would enact justice abstractly, but let’s meet in the horizon of a thought of redemption. Let’s meet in the seeking of a space where redemption could be thought outside its traditional confines of any specific religion or a final judgment or reckoning. Let’s meet in a place where all the histories of oppression and persecution can find their intersectionality and transversality. So too, a place to gather all the means with which, through which life has be preserved and affirmed despite those trials. Let’s search for a space where no one can tell us how we may live, think, speak, and try together to weave our languages, in difference, in common, to understand what such a thought could think, say, and how. Rather than be satiated by wishes or promises of a normalisation which can only be the continuation of this falsified state of things which robs us all of the possibility to breathe, continuing to engender cycles of war, destruction, fictions of immunity to death, causing further death, foreclosing the flourishing of life; let’s meet, let’s think about, let’s create this space, this time, these conditions for a thought, even practices of redemption together.
Nov. 7 2020